Seriously, DNC?
It’s at times like this that I begin to question my membership in the Democratic Party. This bit of ridiculousness arrived in the mail today.
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Tag: Barack Obama
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Please understand your income tax before you complain about it
I found this on Daring Fireball but it’s worth passing on to my minute (!) but loyal (?) readership:
Does ABC News understand how income tax works?
I knew this (aren’t I so smart?) but I suspect a lot of people don’t, and if you’re ranting and raving about taxes, or especially about the Obama tax plan, it’s probably worth a refresher. The relevant quote:
In reality, a family earning $255,000 will pay the higher tax rate only on its last $5,001 in income; the first $249,999 will continue to be taxed at the old rate. So intentionally lowering your income from $255,000 to $249,999 is counter-productive; it will result in a lower after-tax income.
In other words, yes, there are tax brackets, and incomes within the different brackets are taxed at different rates. But you can think of it this way: your total income is divided up into segments based on these brackets, and each of those segments is taxed at the rate for that bracket. So trying to reduce your income to get under the wire of a particular tax bracket is fundamentally misguided.
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Chief Justice Roberts should have watched this…
…before attempting to administer President Obama’s oath of office from memory. On a less cynical note, it is a beautiful thing that smart and creative people are enthusiastically engaged with the political process, and that we have, in our new president, someone who inspires this kind of involvement and energy.
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The fine line between magnanimous and pusillanimous
I’m not sure which side of the line this very generous biography of George W. Bush from President Obama’s version of the official White House site is on, but I do know it’s close to the line.
To be fair, a collection of brief biographical essays on our 44 presidents, published on the official White House website, is not the place for political attacks. But at times this essay goes beyond generous, and in fact beyond belief. Forget the audacity of hope; I want an explanation for the audacity of the claim that Bush worked to “conserve our environment.” And, sorry, but I have to read between the lines of sentences like this one: “Because President Bush believed the strength of America lies in the hearts and souls of our citizens, he supported programs that encourage individuals to help their neighbors in need.” Translation: Bush mercilessly cut funding to government programs that help those who need it most.
But the Bush years are over. It’s time to look forward. I’m willing to keep looking forward, as long as someone else remembers to look backward, specifically into such things as who was responsible for the United States engaging in torture, and whether or not war crimes were committed.
Like I said, I’ll leave that to someone else (say, a special prosecutor appointed by the Obama Administration). Meanwhile, I’ll focus on more important things, like Martin Van Buren’s bitchin’ muttonchops. Why the hell haven’t those made a comeback?
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Unless you’re a web geek, you probably don’t know what this means…
…but it’s a good thing.
From kottke.org: The country’s new robots.txt file.
Well, it’s probably easy to read too much into this. But the short story of it is that President Obama’s new whitehouse.gov website is blocking a lot less content from search engine “spiders” than that of Ex-President Bush (oh, that has a sweet ring to it).
Now there are plenty of reasons for putting things into your robots.txt file, and most of them have nothing to do with trying to withhold information from the public.
It’s rather odd, though, the set of directories Bush’s site was blocking from the spiders. I find expectmore and help especially amusing. The others aren’t quite so funny. What exactly about omb (Office of Management and Budget) did they need to hide? And… uh… well… 911 kind of goes without saying.
Why block these pages from being indexed by search engines? Good question. And here, I think, is the answer: to make it harder for the average citizen to keep track of changes that have been made to those pages by accessing Google’s cached versions (or, perhaps even more damning, the indefinitely-archived snapshots on the Wayback Machine).
But, it’s a new day. President Obama has promised a much more open and transparent White House, and if the visible underbelly of its website is any indication, he intends to keep his promise.
Also of interest: Here’s a comparison of the old and new whitehouse.gov sites.
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Yes he is. (Well, almost.)
In just 3 short hours, as I write this, Barack Obama will be sworn in as 44th President of the United States of America, ushering in a new era in more ways than I can describe. I’ll be watching the proceedings on MSNBC.
No president in recent memory has entered office with such a high approval rating (83%), but no president ever has entered office with as many hopes and expectations riding on his shoulders. He’s uniquely qualified to be the man in this time, in this place, however, and if anyone can do it, he can.
We can.
It’s going to be an interesting four years…
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Reading presidential body language
As just about everyone who pays attention probably knows by now, the Bush White House today convened a Presidents Club luncheon, consisting of the 3 surviving ex-presidents, the White House’s current occupant, and Barack Obama, who in less than three weeks will be setting up shop in the Oval Office.
I find the photo above to be fascinating as a study in body language. George W. Bush stands front and center, but seems nervously out-of-place, with his awkward smirk and cocked left foot. Barack Obama is both leaning and looking away from the current president, speaking with his father. There is a strange stiffness in his comportment, as if simply standing in close proximity to “Dubya” is creating negative energy. GHWB stands at the end, hand outstretched in mid-sentence, in a position that suggests either patting a child on the head or pushing them away.
Bill Clinton stands grinning wistfully, hands behind his back, contemplating, perhaps, his own personal history (and I mean personal) in the very room in which the five men now stand.
And Jimmy Carter knows exactly what’s on Bill’s mind.
I’ll leave you to ponder the merits, or lack thereof, of my decision to omit an apostrophe in the phrase “Presidents Club.”
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The historical basis for vote distribution in this year’s election goes back farther than I thought… by several million years
I’ve been examining maps on my own and also reading commentary on voting patterns in the southern United States this year, most of which reaffirmed some not-too-surprising facts:
- African-Americans voted overwhelmingly in favor of Barack Obama
- White voters voted substantially less for Obama than did African-American voters
- Racism played a role in some voters’ decision, at least to the extent that some white McCain voters would not support Obama due to his race
As a result of these and other facts, some correlated, some not, some distinctive maps of voting patterns have emerged. One I found interesting (which I will add to this page if I can locate it) showed that while almost the entire country voted more Democratic than in 2004, there was a band through the Middle South stretching from West Virginia to Oklahoma that moved towards the Republicans.
But within the mostly “red” region of the South, there also was a smaller “Blue” band that went for Obama. And here we’re referring to actual percentages, not changes with respect to 2004 voting patterns.
Again, not a terribly big surprise. Population distribution of African-Americans is not even throughout the South; blacks tend to live predominantly in areas where cotton plantations existed during the pre-Civil War era. So, looking back into history a few hundred years, we can see that patterns of plantation distribution and the profoundly regrettable history of slavery contributed directly to the distribution of voting patterns in the 2008 election.
But it goes back a lot farther than that. Why were plantations distributed as they were? Well, that comes back to the soil — a “fertile crescent” of deep black soil through that region. And why does that soil exist as it does, in that particular configuration? This question takes us all the way back to the location of the Atlantic coastline during the Cretaceous Period, 85 million years ago. For a deeper explanation, read on.
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The Obama-Biden Transition Project
This is something that I think is big news, but so far I’ve heard nothing about it in the “News.”
In the words of Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, from an email I received today:
The Obama-Biden Transition Project is a nonpartisan entity whose purpose is to facilitate the transition to a new government and prepare for the next administration.
In the past, efforts like these have often been very secretive and funded by the D.C. lobbying and corporate community.
But, like in the campaign, we’ve decided to do things differently.
For the first time, transition efforts won’t be financed with donations from Washington lobbyists and PACs — which means we’ll need to keep asking for your help. Your generosity during the campaign helped get us here, but building a more transparent and open government means continuing to rely on a broader group of people to do this the right way.
That’s cool, I think, and also significant. I made several donations to the campaign over the course of the year, and I’ve made a donation to the transition project, too. Donating money is the lazy way to get involved, of course, but at least it’s something. I really believe Barack Obama is committed to doing politics differently, and I believe he has the brains and the vision to make it happen. If you agree with me, here’s how you can help.
(P.S. Yes, they got Copeland to play drums.)
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Benjamin Netanyahu “borrows” Obama’s website design
File under “Nothing New Under the Sun.” Barack Obama’s website was a key factor in his electoral success, and the campaign of Israeli Prime Minister candidate (again) Benjamin Netanyahu is hoping to capitalize on that with a very close knockoff version of its own. Read more at the New York Times.
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